Barbican Hall
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| Images: Mark Allan/Barbican |
Diana Damrau (soprano)
Jonas Kaufmann (tenor)
Helmut Deutsch (piano)
Nationality is a complicated
thing at the best of times. (At the worst of times: well, none of us needs
reminding about that.) What, if anything, might it mean for Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook? Almost whatever you
want it to mean, or not to mean. Wolf, one might say, was an Austrian composer,
which is or at least was certainly to say also a German composer; yet he was
born in Windischgrätz, now Slovenj Gradec. Both names for what was long a
Styrian town refer to the Slovene or Wendish Graz, to distinguish it from the
larger Graz. And so on, and so forth. Mitteleuropaïsch
is more than a collection of disparate identities; it is an identity in itself.
It certainly was in the Austrian Empire in which Wolf was born, and it
certainly was in the Dual Monarchy in which he grew up. Moreover, northern
Italy had long been part, to varying extents, and depending on who was, of that
identity too. So too, however, had a romanticised German idea of ‘Italy’, of
the Mediterranean, of the South. Look to Goethe and Liszt, for instance – or to
Paul Heyse’s selection and translations of songs, as set by Wolf (not greatly,
or indeed at all, to Heyse’s pleasure).
What one can say is that this
idealised ‘Italy’, Tuscan rispetti
and Venetian vilote could only have
come from without the Italian lands. If ‘German’ constitutes at least as
multifarious a multitude of sins as ‘Italian’, these songs remain very much a
German evocation of lightness, of sunlight, of serenades, of a ‘love’ that is
rarely, if ever that of German Romanticism, although it may well be viewed
through that prism. All three performers at this Barbican recital understood
that, I think: both intuitively and intellectually. At any rate, the tricky
balance between Italian ‘light’, in more than one sense, and German ‘prism’
seemed almost effortlessly communicated – however much art had been required to
convey such an impression.
The songbook is not a
song-cycle, so to speak of ‘reordering’ is perhaps slightly misleading. At any
rate, the ordering selected made good sense, grouping the book’s forty-six
little songs into four groups, which, if not exactly narratives of their own, made
sense as scenes or, if you will, scenas. One made connections as and when one
wished; nothing was forced, much as in the music and the performances
themselves. Diana Damrau and Jonas Kaufmann opted, boldly yet not too boldly,
for a staginess alive to the humour, or at least to the potential for humour
without sending anything up or otherwise trying to turn the songs into
something they are not. Helmut Deutsch, in general the straight man, perhaps
had the ultimate moment of humour, in his piano evocation of a hapless violinist
(‘Wie lange schon war immer mien Verlangen), Damrau having ambiguously prepared
the way, at least in retrospect, with a lightly wienerisch account. Deutsch provided an excellent sense of
structure throughout: non-interventionist perhaps, but none the worse for that.
Damrau and Kaufmann, after all, were intended to be the ‘stars’ here.
In general, but only in general,
Damrau’s performances – roughly alternating, yet with a few exceptions – were knowing,
whilst Kaufmann’s were lovelorn. Such is the order of things in this ‘German
Italy’. Metaphysics, when they reared their head – more in Wolf than in Heyse –
tended to be the tenor’s. Was he right to make relatively little of them? I am
not sure that right or wrong makes much sense here. Perhaps it is all, or
mostly, in inverted commas anyway. There were a few occasions when I found
Kaufmann, especially during the first half, somewhat generalised, but such
generality remains a very superior form: more baritonal still than I can recall
having heard him, yet with an ardent, show-stopping tenor, even upper-case Tenor,
that puts one in mind, just in time, of his Walther (‘Ihr seid die
Allerschönste’) or his Bacchus (‘Nicht länger kann ich singen’). And Damrau was
perfectly capable of responding, of singing about his singing, as for instance,
in ‘Mein Liebster singt am Haus’, to which Kaufmann’s ‘Ein Ständchen Euch zu
bringen’ came as the perfect response, and so on. Piano and voice together in
the latter song conveyed to near perfection the shallow yet genuine sexual
impetuosity of youth. (Or is that just what older people think?) The lightness
of a wastrel’s self-pity in ‘O wüsstest du, wie viel ich deinetwegen,’ was
likewise finely judged. So too was the cruelty of his beloved in ‘Du denkst mit
einem Fädchen’.
Yet, as the two archetypes,
stereotypes, call them what you will, drew closer towards the end of
the first half, there was genuine affection too, or so one thought. The rocking
piano in ‘Nun lass uns Frieden schliessen’ suggested, without unnecessary underlining,
a peace perhaps all the more interesting, or at least characteristic, for its
lack of interest in passing all understanding. For, as that half had climaxed
with an acknowledged role for Wolf’s Lisztian Romantic inheritance, so the
piano harmonies of the second half took up from that half-destination, taking
us somewhere new, briefly darker (the austere Doppelgänger flirtation of ‘Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschweiegen’)
and ultimately, once again, ‘lighter’, yet perhaps never truly ‘light’.
Sweetness of death (‘Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder’) intervened,
yet was it but an act, the commedia dell’arte
perhaps, or, as the Marschallin would soon have it, ‘eine wienerische Maskerad[e]’.
Increasingly, neither party wished truly to resist, whilst making great play of
doing so: on stage as well as in music. An air of Straussian sophistication
became more marked, without ever shading into mere cynicism. If the ‘girl’ were
always going to win, that was as it ‘should’ be. There were enough
qualifications, or potential alternative paths and readings, though, to make
one wonder. And then to wonder – ‘lightly’ or no – why one was wondering at all.
